Sunday, 1 July 2012

When I began on this year of pruning out possessions, giving
away 366 things, I didn’t expect so many interior changes.

At this point, my mind is drawn ever back to relationship
with:

Silence

Money

Electricity

Solitude

Immediacy

Silence has a connection in my mind with Gelassenheit and
humility, with waiting: as the Tao says, “Who can wait until muddy water
becomes clear?”

Money – well, I have gone through my accounts of the last
few months, and am shocked, really shocked, by the amount of money I spend, and
how pointlessly and easily. I am thinking
through my relationship with money, and how to sit more lightly to money. I have read intensively in recent times (and am still reading and researching) about modern-day people who live without
money, and how they make provision for their lives, their choices, dwellings
and daily occupation. From what I have
seen, it appears necessary that for each person who lives without money there
must be a substantial network of people dependent on the usual money
system. In other words, the moneyless
people are gleaners. I have no objection
to this, just am interested. It is part
of their contribution to society – treasure-hunting amid the waste,
demonstrating that what is discarded was in fact valuable. I have not so far come across a moneyless
group that includes children, old people, frail, chronically ill, dying or
disabled people. I cannot see how they
could manage without significant injections of money – not without great
suffering. But I am interested in the
idea of living without money, and at the moment I am drawing the information I
can glean from moneyless lives to intercept my relationship with money, which
needs taking right back to the root and re-growing. So I am gleaning from the gleaners. They live on the periphery of society, in it
but not of it, and make a strong prophetic contribution to society as a whole.

In thinking about electricity, I have become interested in
the change in balance made to my/our life as soon as powered facilities enter
the equation – electric light, power tools, fuelled vehicles, central heating
and so on. The changes to the overall
structure of our lives are radical and no doubt beneficial – but they ramify
into the deepest parts of who we become.
I would like to begin disengagement from the powered life – when I say
begin, I mean make a gradual, incremental change, a lateral drift.

Solitude is becoming increasingly necessary, and the
stimulus of engagement and interaction makes my head spin. I am intrigued by the lives of solitaries,
and I read about them. I’ve added a
small list of links in the right-hand pane on this page in case you are
interested too. I think my father was by
nature a solitary.

All these things – silence, solitude, money, electricity –
are bound up in immediacy. In silence,
one faces the wilderness of wild beasts and angels in one’s own soul very
immediately and inescapably. In
solitude, one clambers about among the rocks and ravines of the spiritual
territory, learning little but experiencing much, assailed by the terrors of
peace. Money and electricity both create
distance and isolation (oddly, isolation and solitude are very different
things). They hold the living world with
all its teeming vibrant richness, at a remove.
Money and electricity are the means by which we refuse to be at life’s
mercy, override the natural rhythms of day and night, health and sickness (even
death). Money and electricity alter our sources and expectation of food and
clothing, warmth and shelter. Without
them we are plunged into a sudden urgent immediacy of life – what we can glean
and gather, the necessity of firewood and the value of daylight, the grateful warmth
of a sunny day, the precious arrival of rain, the treasure of wind to dry wet
clothes and air the house. Making with
our own hands is slow and mindful work, and we find our soul has gone into the
finished creation. When we eat the
potato, the cherry, the apple, the bean, everything about it is full of the
memory of the long cold spring, or the dry spell in June, or the relentless
winds of March that held up the planting, or the late frosts that took half the
crop. If we ride in a trap pulled by a
horse, we notice the comfortable back and forth rhythm of the pull-and-slack,
quite different from the driving of a powered vehicle. When we go on foot, we know so much more of
the terrain – the gradients, the wild flowers, the creatures who live there,
the variations of shelter and exposure, the composition of the track. And when we go barefoot, the information magnifies
exponentially in its immediacy. Life
without immediacy is only a shadow, a husk, of what it was meant to be.

I am not sure of the place in my life of silence, solitude,
money, electricity and immediacy, but it has become clear to me that these are
the areas needing focus and revision – touch-stones or flash-points or
something.

---------------------------------------------------

365 366 Day 183 – Sunday
July 1st

These small acrylic cups were packaging from store-bought
desserts. Disconcerting. Unjustifiable. I kept them for a while to use as glasses,
and for the Wretched Wretch to play with: but in the end I faced that they were
clutter and rubbish, their manufacture and purpose an inexcusable cost to
Mother Earth.

365 366 Day 182 – Saturday
June 30th

Small cards are a form of clutter I have observed to be
increasing. Store gift cards or loyalty
cards, library cards, fridge magnets, appointment reminders, cards for blood
donation, cards with sentimental verses for recipients to tuck into a wallet .
. . every passing thought and intention and obligation seems to require
bringing into permanent material form.

We had over half a million people without electricity in Ohio, after a storm on Friday. Many will not have it for a week. No hot water for showers, and a lot of food will need to be thrown out.

We are fortunate to still have it. My son gets very little sleep in this heat, without an air conditioner. We've had over a week of temperatures in the 90s, during the day, and are looking at another coming on.

It is easy to spend money very quickly, without much thought, especially as prices continue to rise. I also have a billfold packed with cards. Everyone wants to be remembered, to pitch for a sale every time you open your wallet.

Hi Pilgrim - what you say about Ohio is another really good reason for re-examining my relationship with electricity. In these turbulent times I imagine such events as you describe will happen more and more. Though none of us can entirely insulate ourselves against common misfortune, if our lives are simple and basic the challenges have to be very serious to affect us significantly. Some things of course we can only do collaboratively. I read one time about a town in California where they planted a great many trees, and as these grew up the need for air conditioning diminished considerably - but the civic imagination doesn't usually stretch to such visionary lengths.Absolutely about the money - it just runs out like water!!

Thank you for sharing those thoughts. I'm at a time in my life (small children to home educate, bakery to run) when I find it hard to make time to read as much as I would like. Your concerns are similar to mine, and I value learning about the things which you have read and pondered upon.

I have just started a big clean up, that we probably won't have time to finish this time round, which is why it is there I guess. I have had five kids, and all these excess things are from the time of a full house, a magazine habit, keeping baby fixings? etc.

But, when it is taken away I will have not much, because our money has been tight lately and I haven't been spending money on clothes, makeup, decorating etc. It will look spartan. I don't live near chain stores. I was looking today for a decoration for my room, if I can afford one lol. Basically you need a certain amount spent on you and children to be well maintained as the real estate people put it. I see old friends I grew up with in the city now with money and they look different to me. So I mean a certain amount to be well maintained, the rest seemed to take something away from them, the good life is taking something from them. I had a nice bottle of wine, shouted it to myself and it was nice. So I think an occasional treat may help, but I think it is a way of life for them so maybe not a treat so much any more. I don't know, I remember being like that when I was in my 30s. I like this semi spartan life better, but want it to be slightly easier, which it will be I think.

I'm catching up after being away for 2 weeks, with a day and a half at home between weeks. It was during that day and a half that the huge storm hit Ohio (see Pilgrim's comment). Our home was without power and phone for 8 days. The last time this happened, I learned many of the lessons on which you meditate here. But this time, the storm and power outage accompanied a terrible heat wave. About 30 people died. I was away, of course, but I heard daily from my dear husband about the trials of trying to keep pets comfortable in my absence, and the efforts to keep the fish in the backyard pond from dying. (We lost two before we realized they were in trouble.)

I don't know what the solution would be if our country were without any electricity. The local governments opened up community centers and shelters for people to come to, to escape the heat and charge their phones. During times like this, I recognize that my romantic notions run hard up against the reality of Mother Nature, and I count my blessings for living in a 1st world country.

Hi Paula - good to hear from you!Ohio . . . there's a significant Amish population in Ohio, sin't there? And they don't have phones or electricity in their homes, but they do have a significant number of animals. I wonder how they care for their people and animals in the heat wave?

Yes, there is a very large population of Amish in the northern part of Ohio.

Well, I've just done a google search, and many people point out what folks have done for hundreds of years. Work early in the day and late. Live in the basement. Cook outside. Wide porches. Houses built for cross-ventilation (largely forgotten by new builders). In addition, drink lots of water and lemonade, and play in the creek. For animals, the Amish apparently will put a tub of water by the road to help travelers sustain their horses.

Barns are often high-ceilinged enough to allow heat to rise away from the ground.

Two weeks ago, I was at the Stillwater Friends Meetinghouse in Barnesville, Ohio, when a heat wave struck us. The meetinghouse is cavernous, but we were very hot. We used hand fans, in addition to electric. The kitchen and dining hall at Olney Friends School are partly basement. Much cooler there than anywhere else. The girls' dormitory is built into the side of the hill, so the lower level is quite cool, and breezes come through to cool the first floor (upper level), which faces north.

We have largely forgotten how to keep cool through proper house design and planting shade trees. I have neighbors who cut down their trees because they hate to rake leaves. Their yard is bleak, and their air conditioner runs all the time. But we have become accustomed to electricity, and when it is 100 degrees for several days in a row, we can't just roll with the punches.

Aha! Such good and practical measures! I especially like the working early and late, because it's one of those strategies that can be done without special technology or altering the house or spending money - just simple adaptation.Stillwater Meeting House - that's the one where the Conservative Friends Meeting is that Kevin Roberts posts the photos of on the website, isn't it? I love those photos!

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An Inspiration

‘Let us pass through your country. We will stay on the main road; we will not turn aside to the right or to the left. Sell us food to eat and water to drink for their price in silver. Only let us pass through on foot until we cross the Jordan into the land the Lord our God is giving us.’

(Deuteronomy 2.27-28, 29b NIV UK)

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